UNCW team receives nearly $1 million sponge research grant
WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — A team of researchers at UNCW has received a grant for nearly $1 million to help fund a sea sponge research project.
The work is being conducted off the coast of Belize on Carrie Bow Cay. The Smithsonian Institution Caribbean Coral Reef Ecosystems Program is providing opportunities for UNCW students and faculty to further their cutting-edge research on sea sponges and how they affect the overall health of coral reefs.
The research is federally funded by a new National Science Foundation grant. UNCW scientists say they want to know more about what sea sponges are doing to their environment as they process the large volumes of seawater they pump every day.
“This work represents leading research to address basic, but unknown, questions about how reef ecosystems, which are critical for biodiversity, function,” UNCW Center for Marine Science executive director Dr. Ken Halanych said. “One of the novel aspects of this grant is scientists from several different disciplines are coming together to address the same issue from multiple different angles.”
This newly funded research is the next phase in the ongoing work of Dr. Strangman, Dr. Pawlik and the rest of the team to discover more about what is happening in the coral reef ecosystem at the most fundamental level.
“We know that sponges are taking over the reef as coral health declines,” Dr. Strangman said. “The Caribbean reefs of the future are likely going to be dominated by sponges, so now we are trying to understand their impact on the nutrition in the seawater around the reefs.”
The team will gather water samples before and after they are processed by sponges and bring the samples back to the CMS labs to learn more about what dissolved compounds the sponges are absorbing and what effect it is having on nutrients and other chemicals in the water column.
The team will also develop an outreach component of the project that will share their marine science knowledge with Wilmington community groups such as UNCW MarineQuest summer programs.
